Risking the Northwest Passage

As a young man, Roald Amundsen set out with a friend on an Arctic training exercise, skiing west of Oslo to a mountain range with a plateau that extended to Bergen. While the two hoped to reach their goal in two days, a blizzard, combined with the pair’s lack of preparation for the trip, turned a training exercise into a misadventure that almost ended in tragedy. As a result of this...

Lynne Cox's whale tale

While others are stretching and reaching blindly for that first cup of morning coffee, legendary swimmer Lynne Cox is earning her breakfast with a miles-long unsupervised swim in the cold Pacific Ocean. This championship swimmer has dodged ocean liners, conquered channels, and written perceptively about it all in an acclaimed memoir, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer. But...

A swimmer's determination

As a chubby nine-year-old, Lynne Cox was the slowest kid in the pool. But she loved swimming, so she kept plugging away at it. When the coach ordered her class out of the water because a storm was brewing, she got permission to keep swimming. When hail started falling, Cox kept swimming alone in a pool full of ice.Scientists would later determine that her unique ratio of muscle to body fat made...